"On the way back from Jenin we heard about the killing of the mother and four daughters of the Hatuel family, from Gush Katif. Athidel and Mazan Azuka have lost two sons, and their killings are not considered criminal acts of murder."

Athidel and Mazan Azuka had three sons. Osama was killed three years ago, at the age of 13. Mohammed was killed two weeks ago, after taking a high-school exam in English. Only Marwan is left

On the way back from Jenin we heard about the killing of the mother and four daughters of the Hatuel family, from Gush Katif. Athidel and Mazan Azuka have lost two sons, and their killings are not considered criminal acts of murder. Mazan, a grocer, and his wife, Athidel, had three sons, and now only one is left. Osama was killed by soldiers during a demonstration as he walked with his father and his older brother, Mohammed. Mohammed was shot during an assassination operation two weeks ago. He was a high-school student, a passerby, who was on his way from an examination to sign up for a trip, when soldiers shot him in the head, about half an hour after liquidating the people they were after. There are times when anyone walking the streets of Jenin is marked for death, because of the war against terrorism.

Intensive work is under way on both sides of the barrier that suffocates Jenin. On the Israeli side a huge terminal is being built, as on an international border; and on the Palestinian side they are repairing the damage done by tanks that destroyed everything they encountered. Bulldozers opposite bulldozers, build a new and dubious future, until the next round of destruction, seemingly working in coordination, separated by the fence. There's a lot of construction work going on in the city's refugee camp, too: They are rebuilding in the wake of the devastation wrought by the big invasion of the Israel Defense Forces two years ago. At the end of the summer, the first families are scheduled to move into their new homes at "ground zero," the area of the "earthquake."

Jenin is under closure. A girl carrying a pink parasol is strolling atop the soft limestone hill on which the camp stands, a young man in a wheelchair moves slowly along a street at the bottom. A circle of stones surrounds bloodstains in the sand at the corner of al-Zuhur and Omar al-Mukhtar streets. The blood is that of Mohammed Azuka. His photograph, together with one of his slain brother, appears on the memorial posters that are pasted on a tin slab next to the improvised monument of blood and stones.

Not far from there, inside his tiny grocery store, located at the entrance to the city's produce market, sits Mazan Azuka, the bereaved father. He sells eggs out of a pail and the photographs of his dead sons hang above his head. He's 53, has thick glasses, and some of his teeth are missing.

A staircase leads from the grocery store to the house. Osama was killed first, at the beginning of the present intifada, in November 2000, on a day when 10 Palestinians and two soldiers were killed and no one gave a second thought to one more dead Palestinian child. It was a Friday, after the prayers. A demonstration set out from the mosque to Jalameh checkpoint. The children threw stones at the soldiers, the soldiers fired bullets at the children, and Osama fell to the ground between his father and his older brother, a bullet lodged in his heart. Two lines in the newspaper. At home a meal of his favorite foods, chicken and potatoes, prepared by his mother, was waiting, his father now relates with an expression of resignation. Osama was 13 and a half when he died, Osama.

Two weeks ago on Saturday - April 24 - the eldest son, Mohammed, had an English exam. At 19 , he had already taken the English matriculation exam once, and failed, and decided to try again. When he got home ,his father asked him how it went, and Mohammed said it had been all right. He took two biscuits from the grocery store and went to sign up for a weekend trip with neighborhood youngsters, to Tul Karm. Half an hour later someone came to the grocery store and told the stunned father: Your son was killed.

When Mohammed left the store with the biscuits, an IDF undercover unit - Israeli soldiers dressed as Arabs - was waiting in ambush for wanted individuals at the corner of Al-Zuhur and Al-Mukhtar Streets. Mohammed, of course, knew nothing about all this. Kamal Tubassi, from the Al-Aqsa Brigades, and his associate, Said Hardan, were driving in a yellow Volkswagen Golf on the street that leads from the town hall. Slightly before the intersection, as they were about to turn right onto a narrow street that cuts through a small olive grove to their favorite cafe, a Mercedes van filled with caged chickens suddenly swerved in front of them and blocked their way. The occupants of the van opened fire at the car. According to the testimonies we collected at the scene of the assassination, the wanted men didn't have time to shoot back. The disguised soldiers hid among the cages.

Mohammed was killed next to a high-tension electricity pole on the sidewalk; behind it there is a small garden and a one-story house. The soldiers hid behind bushes in the garden and down the road; it's not clear what they were waiting for, since they had already disposed of the two wanted individuals. Tawfiq Jumaa, whose porch overlooks the intersection, says he saw the soldiers kill the two men; one of them managed to get out of the car and was killed on the road, while the other was killed inside the car. He says they were shot at close range and that they did not fire at the soldiers. It happened next to the Najoud beauty parlor, about 20 or 30 meters from the place where Mohammed was later killed. After the assassination, several jeeps arrived and linked up with the liquidators. Another half-hour passed before Mohammed was killed.

The two brothers are buried next to each other in the cemetery for martyrs of the first intifada at the edge of the refugee camp. Here is a photograph of Mohammed and Marwan - the only remaining brother - in which Mohammed's hand rests lightly on his younger brother's shoulder. "After God, we have only one boy left," the father says. "Only the last son and God."

A few minutes after the assassination, journalist Ali Samudi, who works for Al-Jazeera and Reuters, arrived on the scene. Wearing a steel helmet and a protective vest with "Press" clearly inscribed on it in English, he had rushed to the site after hearing the shots. It was around noon. He saw about 10 men - among them Mohammed Azuka - who had gathered up the street and were watching the events unfold. They tried to move closer to the two wanted men who were lying, one in the car, one on the road, perhaps dead or perhaps only wounded, to see whether they could help. Samudi wanted to take pictures. The IDF jeeps had left and they were convinced that the soldiers had gone and that they could advance.

They approached the bodies slowly. Samudi says he was walking behind Azuka. None of them was armed, though Samudi says that some of the youngsters may have been holding stones. After advancing about 10 meters shots suddenly rang out from the garden and the lower part of the street. Samudi saw Azuka fall to the ground. Another youngster was wounded in the thigh. Samudi: "We were scared and we turned and ran. Then I understood that the special forces were still in the area."

A few minutes later the Jeeps, five of them, returned from every direction. Samudi wanted the soldiers to see him and identify him as a journalist, so he stood in the middle of the road. He has already been wounded once, in the legs. Along with another journalist and a fieldworker from B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, who arrived on the scene, they stood next to the soldiers for about half an hour. The bodies of the two wanted men lay further down the street, Azuka's body lay at the intersection. Three Palestinian ambulances arrived, but the soldiers didn't let them approach. Masked soldiers carrying heavy machine guns were scattered over the whole area, Samudi says. They ordered him and his two colleagues to leave, and they retreated in the direction of the nearby cemetery. Half an hour later, when they tried again to emerge from the cemetery, a jeep sped toward them and a soldier told them to leave. "Get out of here, ya manyak, go on," the soldier said. Samudi: "I was afraid. I told my friends that we had to go, because the situation was bad. We decided to stand next to the Jeeps, where it was safer. It was impossible to go back in the other direction. There was army there, and stone- throwing. I wanted to photograph the bodies. We advanced slowly."

After a few meters, Samudi heard the other journalist call him from behind. He turned around immediately and felt something hit him in the nose. What happened, he asked his colleague, but the blood was already streaming onto his clothes and he realized that he had been shot in the nose. He is certain that if he hadn't turned around he would have been shot in the head, like Azuka. He is convinced that a sniper was aiming for his head from the end of the street.

The response from the IDF Spokesperson's Office: "During the operation [in Jenin], the soldiers were fired upon from several positions. In one case, the troops saw that a local journalist had been wounded by the fire directed at the soldiers. The journalist was evacuated by the Red Crescent to a clinic for medical treatment. This is not the first time that the terror organizations have used children and youths, of younger and younger ages, and knowingly endangered their lives to assist in terrorist operations."

Samudi, in his office this week, his nose bandaged in a strange way: "They could have arrested Kamal and Said [the two wanted men]. They could have shot Azuka in the leg. But they came to kill. The message is to kill. Two hours later they killed another Palestinian, in Qabatiya."

A few days earlier, the IDF scattered leaflets for the residents of Jenin in the middle of the night: "The cessation of terrorism in the area will bring you more freedom and improve your economic situation ... The terrorists are wrecking your society ... Do not lend a hand to the terrorists ... Anyone who helps the terrorists will suffer the same fate they do."